The State of Virginia, 1787
Samuel Cobham came home to stay at last. He was in Rebecca’s arms when he died of lung congestion on a cold March Day. The family buried him beneath a big, old tree near the house where he had enjoyed sitting on warm summer evenings. Rebecca remembered him there so vividly, cleaning his guns and telling stories of the wars to his grandchildren.
He had become a prosperous man in Virginia, and Rebecca was furious as usual when he left on a trip over the mountains to investigate new routes for moving their furs and whiskey down toward the Mississippi. He had been bored that winter, and by February he claimed that the weather was good enough for him to make the trip. Rebecca accused him of simply being restless and tired of the company of his wife and grandchildren. But she knew in her heart that Sam was trying to outrun time itself. He was sixty-seven years old and fretting because his hearing and eyesight weren’t all that they once were. His joints ached, and on some days he had trouble climbing up hills. He hated getting old.
According to Toby and the grandsons who rode with him, Samuel became ill before the party reached the home of their sons over in Tazewell. He delayed at William’s house and felt somewhat better. He must have looked west over the mountains and longed to see new vistas. But in the end, he turned back to the east and Rebecca—just as he had, more than forty years before.
She nursed him with every skill at her disposal. The doctors could do nothing and claimed that he was just too old to survive the lung problems. Rebecca steamed him, sent to Richmond for any possible remedy, and watched his every breath. She gave him tonics of mugwort and cider with elecampane. She slept by his side at night and sat with him during her waking hours.
“Don’t you dare leave me, Sam,” she told him over and over. Sometimes, he could hear her and would give her that endlessly wonderful grin. It was hard for him to speak, but he would squeeze her hand gently. One day, he just quit breathing.
It had been raining for days when Sam died. Rebecca herself decided that he would be buried under his tree. She issued instructions for the funeral and talked Reverend Ingram into giving a rather long sermon even though Sam had not been a devout man. There was much food, a hundred family members, and plenty of liquor when Sam was buried. Rebecca supervised it all with cold, tearless eyes. She was still furious that Sam was gone again.
Rebecca had worn dark colors for many years. It was something of a shock to all who knew her that for Sam’s burying, she brought out a gown of bright, peach-colored satin—now faded in some spots and hanging sadly on her thin body. The family thought that Mother had gone daft. Her darkly clad sons and daughters supported her as they stood beneath the dripping tree and heard the clods of earth fall on their father’s casket. When the services were over, all turned back toward the house and warm fires—all except Rebecca. She sat at the edge of the grave in the mud and insisted that everyone leave her alone. Benjamin and the other boys took turns watching over her from a discreet distance.
As darkness increased and brought heavier cold rain, it was her daughter-in-law, Priscilla, who finally approached her.
“Mother Cobham—you must come into the house. You’ll make yourself ill,” she said, holding a waxed cloth over the two of them. Rebecca turned to her with dazed eyes. For a moment, she didn’t recognize Priscilla.
“The boys are standing out here watching you. They’re gonna get sick too. The family needs you, Mother Cobham. We don’t need no more buryin’ just yet.”
“Sam’s gone,” Rebecca explained. “He won’t be back this time. I don’t think that I can live without him,” she whispered. She leaned over the grave and clutched at the mud with one hand. “All of this mud, and I’m here alone.”
“Mother, you’re not alone. We’re your family. You’re my family,” replied Priscilla. “You’re ruining your pretty dress—”
“Sam bought me this dress in Philadelphia. He said that I was the prettiest woman in the colonies. Of course, we’re not colonies anymore, and I am definitely not pretty. Priscilla, you’re not pretty, but you’ve the best sense of any of my family. You’re a good sensible woman. Better to be sensible than pretty. If I had been sensible, I would never have married Sam.” Rebecca still sounded detached as she kneaded the mud on Samuel’s grave, now with both hands.
“Pretty doesn’t last. Sense does, and you got lots of that,” replied Priscilla. “It is gettin’ dark, Mother Cobham. Old Rafe has the rheumatism bad, and my little ones need me. We can’t be sittin’ out here till all hours mourning Father. He’s gone to a better place anyway.”
Rebecca wiped her hands on her skirt over and over again. Her graying hair had slipped from her cap, and she seemed indifferent to the rain that dripped down her cheeks. “There’s no better place for Sam than with me. How could he leave? No matter now, girl. He’s still here and he’ll be mud soon. My heart is down there with him, and we’re both going to be mud …”
Priscilla wondered if she should ask Ben to help her drag the old lady into the house. She had turned to gesture to him when Rebecca finally pushed her aside and, with much effort, stood up. “C’mon now, life is gonna go on. You can’t bring him back with your grief,” said Priscilla sharply, somewhat scared that her strong and capable mother-in-law seemed to have lost her wits. “God must be angry with you havin’ no faith in him.”
Rebecca laughed sharply. “God and I have never been good friends, Priscilla. He has watched our struggles.” She reached into a small bag hanging at her waist and removed two fresh eggs. “This time, I must go to Sam because he won’t come back to me.” With a quick angry gesture, she threw both eggs onto the piled soil covering Samuel Cobham. The eggs shattered in the dark mud, their slimy substance slowly oozing into the dirt. Then Rebecca Cobham began to sob as the pain poured from her. “Your ma has lost her wits,” Priscilla whispered to Ben. Then they half carried her up the hill to the house.
The State of Washington, 1999
Maddie sat in her study and finished reading up the last chapters of Kate’s manuscript. “All romances end,” she thought sourly. “They do not live happily ever after—one of them will die, and the other will mourn until they die too.” She rose from her computer and went to stare out of the window. Her house in Seattle commanded a good view of the lakes below, but on this day the rain was obscuring everything.
She was feeling sad and lonely, which was not unusual when she was finishing a novel, and she had just finished her own book, Green Valley, earlier that week. Then she read the latest pages from Kate. “We really must give this a title,” she thought absently.
Reading about death always brought back that horrible day when the air force chaplain arrived at her door to tell her about the death of Winger Birch. Maddie had thrown up for days and grieved to the point where her family nearly had her hospitalized. After months of grieving, she sealed her second husband away in her heart and went on with life. But farewells were still very difficult for her, even in her fiction.
She could hear rhythmic thuds from the room below. This told her that Winston was home and had immediately hit the play button on her stereo. She sighed. All of her children but Winston were grown now—and she was going to be a grandmother. Alicia was expecting a baby—and mentioned that she might consider marrying the father, who was an advertising executive in New York. Alicia herself, a graphics designer with all of her Italian father’s unpredictability, was not too sure that she could bear being wed to a businessman who voted conservative Republican.
Maddie turned from the window and walked through the adjoining door to her bedroom. Yellow and pink pastels filled the room with a reminder of spring, and ordinarily she loved the ultrafeminine space. Today, she was reminded that a bedroom was made to be shared, and it had been many years since she had found a man who was that interesting. She paused before a mirror, examining herself carefully. Her agent thought that it might be time for a facelift. “But I look pretty well for a woman my age,” she thought. Her eyes were still bright, her hair kept carefully golden by a good hairdresser, and her skin had always been superb. She poked at her cheeks thoughtfully, wondering if they were getting slack.
She was reminded of the great age that some of her relatives had achieved. “Rebecca was sixty-four when Sam died,” she thought. “She would have been wrinkled and spotted with the sun, probably had lost teeth, showed lots of gray hair, and walked with a slouch from calcium deficit. I will look a helluva lot better than Rebecca in ten years even if I don’t have a facelift. Then again—everybody is doing it, and I will have to make those television appearances for Green Valley.”
She turned from the mirror, considering her future schedule. Now that the book was finished, she would have time to have some surgery. Then again, she would have to wait until June, when Winston would finish the school term and could go back to England to stay with his father. Perhaps she would go to Santa Barbara and stay with Kate or Aunt Bette while she recovered. Plastic surgery was a growth industry in California. Or she might go to San Francisco and take a nice hotel suite. Maybe Geoff would be feeling well enough so that they could get a place together. In any event, Maddie was certain that it was time for her to end her literary hibernation and get back into the world. Then again, she might start work on another book. She could call it Green Horizons. Then again, she wanted to finish the book that she and Kate were writing. At that point in her deliberations about where to go, the telephone rang.
“Aunt Bette! Just the person I wanted to talk with. Have you had a facelift, Aunt Bette?”
“What kind of a question is that, Madeleine? I’ve been a bit busy this week. Of course, I’ve had a facelift. Thought about having another one, but the doctor was worried that my skin was too fragile to handle it. I had an honest doctor.”
“I’m thinking about doing it. My agent thinks that it is a good idea since I’m making so many public appearances and getting to—well, that age …”
“Piffle. It is about time that the world woke up to the fact that all women don’t stay twenty forever. We get about fifteen years—from our teens until we turn thirty, and all of this is supposed to be the ideal. Well, we spend two-thirds of our lives as something else, and I’m damn tired of people disdaining that.”
“You’re probably right, Aunt Bette. Then again—I’ve got to sell books, and I can’t change the world. Maybe I’ll use your doctor. Who was he?”
“Madeleine, my doctor died twenty years ago. Smoked too much.”
“Oho, the family curse—tobacco!”
“When will you be in Santa Barbara?”
“Next month. Winston is just finishing school here. He hates Seattle, says that it gets boring. I think that he’ll do his last year in England at his old school. I’m meeting with Alistair to talk about it.”
“Alistair? Always liked that fellow. He made me laugh.”
“Oh yes—Alistair was always good for a laugh. Not so much as Antonio …”
“Madeleine, maybe it is time for you to take another husband.”
“No way. That is the last thing that I need.”
“I finished reading Green Valley.”
“Did you like it? My editor says it is the best thing I’ve done so far.”
“I did like it.”
“I may be starting a sequel.”
“Well, quit looking for inspiration in Seattle. Depressing place, always raining. You need to come back to Santa Barbara now, especially since James has had a heart attack.”